Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Week Two in Slovakia continued - Now We're Getting Somewhere, I think.

We started off Tuesday morning by going to the court to see how far along Terezia's divorce from her first marriage is. As mentioned in yesterday's post, even though Terezia's first marriage was in the US, and even though she and her first husband never lived in Slovakia or the EU, she had to register that marriage in Slovakia because she changed her name and needed an updated EU passport. Although Terezia has been divorced in the US for a while, she began the divorce proceedings for Slovakia last May, and this was supposed to have been finalized by now.

We went to the court this morning to check the status. We met with a judge who said that Terezia's file was in her "to do in October" pile, and that it would be finalized this month. Yay! We stressed to the judge the need for expediency, given that we have three months to take care of all this, and she maintained that there shouldn't be any problems, it should all be straight forward, and Terezia and I should be able to register our marriage in Slovakia in early November. This is crucial for me in order to obtain the residency visa, so I'm glad that it appears to be one less thing to worry about.

Next we went to an office where I will have to have the Slovakian equivalent to an FBI background check. Even though I've never lived in Slovakia, I still have to have this done in order to obtain the residency visa. What made me nervous is that I had to have an FBI background check done in the US, and it took three freaking months for the FBI to process it and send me a letter stating that I have a clean record. How long would it take in a country like Slovakia? Roughly two days, or so we were told by the woman working there. I got a form to fill out, and I'll need to submit it with my birth certificate, which will have to be translated into Slovak. So, apparently this is not a big deal and shouldn't take long.

After meeting Anton for lunch, we took the bus back home to pack and get ready for our trip to Italy. We leave tomorrow, so the next post will come from Florence, Italy!